McLaren-Honda to keep same car concept in 2016 F1

Next year’s McLaren car will be an “evolution” of the current MP4-30. Last year, the famous British team finished the season just fifth best, despite having clearly the best engine in the field in the form of the Mercedes.

Behind the scenes, team boss Eric Boullier now admits, things were just not working.

“There has been a huge change in overall culture and philosophy,” he said on Wednesday.

The Frenchman is not just referring to the huge shift from customer Mercedes to works Honda power, which for the moment has left McLaren again trailing the field.

Boullier insists McLaren is now taking an altogether “new approach”, which is bearing fruit.

“I guess about 50 per cent of the upgrades we brought to the track last year didn’t completely work,” he admitted. “This year, we’ve brought that down to about 5 or 10 per cent.”

Indeed, while Honda is still struggling to add power and reliability to its turbo V6 power unit, McLaren insists the actual chassis is on the right track.

Much of that credit might go to Peter Prodromou, who was formerly known as a key deputy to Red Bull’s aerodynamics guru, Adrian Newey.

“Over the last couple of seasons, the team (McLaren) slightly lost its way aerodynamically,” Prodromou admits. “It became obvious that if we’d carried on with the previous concept, there’d only be so much we could achieve.”

And he said that “new aerodynamic concept” is sound.

“Next year’s car will be an evolution of this year’s,” Prodromou announced, “so we need to keep developing it right until the final race.”

Marc Gene, a test driver for Ferrari, says McLaren’s progress since the beginning of the year – when it was dead last – has been obvious.

“It is true that it has taken longer than I thought,” he told Diario Sport, “but the improvement has been very large.

“The evolution from Australia to Bahrain was spectacular, even though (Jenson) Button had many problems.

“Ferrari has turned out (in 2015) better than even the most optimistic outlook, and nobody could have imagined the start McLaren has had either,” Gene added.

“But McLaren is a team with a lot of resources and now they are already at an acceptable level when things are working.” (GMM)